124662-Texto Do Artigo-236741-1-10-20161222

173
TRIBUTE
TO STUART HALL
About bridges and abysms: approaches

and conflicts between cultural
studies and political economy of
communication from Stuart Hall’s work
Sobre pontes e abismos: aproximações
e conflitos entre os estudos culturais e a
economia política da comunicação a partir da
obra de Stuart Hall
L U I Z F E L I P E F E R R E I R A S T E VA N I M*
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Graduate Program in Communication. Rio de Janeiro – RJ, Brazil
ABSTRACT
This paper reflects on the approximations and tensions between cultural studies * Doctoral student in
Communication from
and the political economy of communication, taking the work of Stuart Hall as a Universidade Federal do
contact point. From the reflections that the author proposes on the theme of ideo- Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ),
journalist in the Programa
logy and the relations between economy and culture, we argue that the understan- Radis de Comunicação
ding of social phenomena cannot dispense with an approach that articulates diffe- e Saúde at Fundação
Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz)
rent fields in order to reach the social totality. In his analyzes of culture, ideology, and member in the
and identity, Hall uses the concrete perspective of historical materialism without Grupo de Pesquisa em
Políticas e Economia
limiting himself to economic determinism, especially through a posture of theore- Política da Informação e
da Comunicação (PEIC/
tical renewal that helps to overcome dissent between the two camps. UFRJ). Orcid: http://orcid.
Keywords: Stuart Hall, cultural studies, political economy of communication, org/0000-0002-3586-6280
Email: lfstevanim@yahoo.
ideology, historical materialism com.br
RESUMO
O presente artigo reflete sobre as aproximações e tensões entre os estudos culturais
e a economia política da comunicação, tomando como ponto de contato a obra de
Stuart Hall. A partir das reflexões que o autor propõe sobre o tema da ideologia e as
relações entre economia e cultura, argumenta-se que a compreensão dos fenôme-
nos sociais não pode prescindir de uma abordagem que articule os diferentes cam-
pos, a fim de alcançar a totalidade social. Em suas análises sobre cultura, ideologia
e identidade, Hall serve-se da perspectiva concreta do materialismo histórico sem
se limitar ao determinismo econômico, sobretudo por meio de uma postura de
renovação teórica que ajuda a superar as dissidências entre os dois campos.
Palavras-chave: Stuart Hall, estudos culturais, economia política da comunicação,
ideologia, materialismo histórico
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11.606/issn.1982-8160.v10.i3p.173-186
V.10 - Nº 3 set/dez. 2016 São Paulo - Brasil LUIZ FELIPE FERREIRA STEVANIM p. 173-186 173
About bridges and abysms: approaches and conflicts
between cultural studies and political economy of
In memory of Stuart Hall (1932-2014)
T
ENTRY DOORS: A “FAMILY” RELATIONSHIP UNDER ERASURE
O PUT A thought under erasure is to leave it, in a certain way,
under suspicion, but not in abandonment. On the contrary, it con-
sists in provoking tensions in its logic of argumentation until it is
1. Unlike those forms purified through critical exercise1. This is the tense and provocative rela-
of critique which aim
to supplant inadequate tionship that Stuart Hall establishes with the Marxist heritage. To unders-
concepts with ‘truer’ tand the historical real, Hall uses the concrete perspective of materialism
ones, or which aspire
to the production of without being limited to economic determinism. It is, above all, critical
positive knowledge, the of the authoritarian developments of socialism in the Soviet Union and
deconstructive approach
puts key concepts ‘under in other countries. This ambiguous attitude of approach and withdrawal,
erasure’. This indicates
that they are no longer
which constitutes the author’s way of thinking, was understood by some
serviceable - ‘good of his critics as an abandonment of class questions and social transfor-
to think with’ – in
their originary and
mation, as if his thought followed the postmodern tendency of alienation
unreconstructed form [...]: from material reality. However, Hall re-elaborates these questions through
an idea which cannot be
thought in the old way, his reading of the historical real, by confronting the problems and possi-
but without which certain bilities associated with the notion of ideology and by approaching cultural
key questions cannot be
thought at all.” (Hall, relations from the perspective of power and hegemony, in dialogue with
2000: 103-104). thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci and Karl Marx himself.
The misinterpretations of Stuart Hall’s reflections reinforced the
schism between two streams of studies that Mattelart (2011: 157) charac-
terizes as the tension between two “enemy brothers”: on the one hand,
a perspective associated with Cultural Studies (CS); On the other, that
linked to the Political Economy of Communication (EPC). For Mattelart,
this hiatus was established in a specific context, from the 1980s and 1990s,
between projects that were born convergently “to become distanced from
one another” (ibid.). Although sometimes the research on communication
and culture in Brazil tries to overcome this aspect that neglects the issues
of hegemony and class struggles, underlying other debates such as gender
and race, the dialogue between the political economy of communication
and cultural studies also encounters difficulties.
This schism is even observed in the writings of the early writers of the
political economy of communication, especially in relation to Stuart Hall
and the current opened by David Morley, which led to reception studies.
In a classic text on media economics, Garnham (1979) ponders the postu-
re of post-Althusserian authors who overestimate the ideological level in
communication to the detriment of economic relations. The biggest expo-
174 V.10 - Nº 3 set/dez. 2016 São Paulo - Brasil LUIZ FELIPE FERREIRA STEVANIM p. 173-186
L U I Z F E L I P E F E R R E I R A S T E VA N I M TRIBUTE
TO STUART HALL
nent of this group in Britain, he said, would be Stuart Hall. In the sequen-
ce, Garnham quotes Murdoch and Golding, since both criticize Hall and
emphasize that it is only possible to understand the function of the means
as “ideological apparatuses” from its position. “as large scale commercial
enterprises in a capitalist economic system and if these relations are exa-
mined historically” (Garnham, 1979: 131).
Whoever arrives at the last minute in this academic clash, in which
hidden enemies are fantasized, could suppose Stuart Hall as a detractor of
Marxism on the opposite side to critical thinking. But is it not a contradic-
tion in relation to the author’s original proposal to use the contributions of
historical materialism without limiting itself to its theoretical limitations
and constraints? What justifies this supposed separation between cultural
studies and the political economy of communication? Would the diffe-
rences between the two fields be methodological, epistemological or poli-
tical? Especially in the case of Stuart Hall, who has received the sharpest
criticism on the part of political economists, will there be contributions to
be drawn from his work for the critical analysis of communication in the
economy of capitalism?
This text seeks to delimit the borders and to perceive the approxima-
tion points between cultural studies and political economy of communi-
cation from the supposed polemic on how to place the work of Stuart Hall
in that territory. If we were to think of someone as E. P. Thompson with his
analysis of the working-class conceptions of the world, a way accustomed
to the unorthodox trajectory of the New Left of the 1960s or someone as
Raymond Williams, when analyzing the modes of cultural production, we
would have more quiet openings before us for approach. However – and this
is the central hypothesis of this text – Stuart Hall’s thinking is construc-
ted from a constant dialogue with Marxism, in which the relations between
culture, economy and politics are articulated in a point of view that seeks
to comprehend the totality of social life. Thus, under erasure, Hall’s work
would provide points of contact between cultural studies and the political
economy of communication.
THE RELATIONSHIP OF HALL WITH MARX AND MARXISM:

CONCRETE ANALYSIS OF CULTURE
Although Hall privileges the cultural dimension in his texts, he arti-
culates the economical and the political in his readings of the present time.
However, some of his interpretations seem to point to a universe without
parameters in reality, whose panel would be composed of fluid and mutant

identities, in line with postmodern discourse. This is apparent from a 1987
text, suggestively entitled Minimal selves. To what extent does this position
contradict another moment in which the author states that “Precisely be-
cause identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to
understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites.”
(Hall 2000: 109)?
The conviviality between mutation and coherence in Stuart Hall’s work
puts us permanently at a crossroads: After all, where does he want to go
with all this? For this question, there remains only the answer that there
is no necessary place to arrive, as you would imagine of the trajectory of a
vector driven by deterministic tension. There are, indeed, starting points
and paths. Hall is, above all, a provocateur, a questioner of the conditions
of the present time, which reinforces his relation with the Marxian matrix
of thought, which turns to the analyzes of the concrete reality. According
to this theoretical-methodological option, the formulation of questions is a
more fruitful effort than obtaining simplistic answers.
Looking at the present time implies an effort of conjunctural analysis,
if we do not want to keep up with the immediacy of punctual reactions. This
endeavor goes beyond case studies or situations, although they may emerge
in the flow of time. The methodology used by Stuart Hall derives, therefo-
re, from the articulation between the economic, political and ideological
instances, in order to explain the social phenomena. When he approaches
the intellectual doing, Hall (2007) claims that the present situation is his
object, as the product of “many determinations” (or overdeterminations, a
concept derived from the idea of “overdetermination” by Louis Althusser),
but that remains as “open horizon, fundamentally unresolved, and in that
sense open to ‘the play of contingency’” (Hall, 2007: 279).
There are two dimensions of present time identified by Hall: on the one
hand, it does not appear loose in its crude actuality, but is associated with
the course of time, which offers a history, a space-time reference; on the
other hand, contemporary conditions emerge from various lines, and as a
consequence there is no deterministic cause that explains the root of the
problems. The point being made is: does this position approximate Hall to
historical materialism, since the preoccupations with history are (literally)
present, or is it a historicism without concrete basis? To answer this ques-
tion, we must take a step toward Marx and the Marxists.
In discussing the question of ideology in Karl Marx’s work, Hall (2003c)
understands that the predominance of the economic sphere over the ideolo-
TO STUART HALL
gical sphere in the writings of the German theorist is justified by his effort
to overcome Hegelian idealism and, above all, the conceptions of classical
political economy (by Adam Smith and David Ricardo) that grounded their
analyzes of a-historical and ideal categories, such as the unrestricted free-
dom of commerce and profit. By naturalizing the specific historical condi-
tion of modern capitalism, Smith and Ricardo understood that social rela-
tions had reached their apex in the present system with economic freedom,
and there would be no perfection, a conception from which Marx sharply
disagreed, in view of the workers’ material living conditions and the exis-
tence of what he called “surplus value.”
From his theoretical and political project of constructing a critique
of capitalism, Karl Marx supported the question of ideology under three
pillars, as Stuart Hall himself (2003c: 270) points out: first, the materialist
premise that “ Ideas arise from material conditions “; Second, the determi-
nism of the economic sphere over politics; And third, the connection betwe-
en ideas and social classes, understanding that ‘dominant’ ideas are those of
the ‘ruling class’“. It is in relation to these three premises that Hall puts the
thought of Marx “under erasure,” that is, appropriating it, but overcoming
its limitations. According to Hall, economic determinations would be made
by shaping the material conditions in which ideas are produced, distributed
and consumed, but it does not define the specific content of each of them. In
other words, these are determinations without guarantees, without absolute
predictability, without reductionism.
It is the Italian thinker Gramsci (2007) who clarifies that historical ma-
terialism is not confused with economicism, that is, with the tendency to
reduce social analysis to the economic dimension. Marx consecrated the
celebrated phrase in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their
own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it
under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing alre-
ady, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx, 1974: 335). Gramsci, and
then Louis Althusser, always quoted by Hall, will tailor this conception of
Marx and break with the tendency to consider economics as a determinant
of social life.
For Gramsci, as Hall shows, it would be reductionism to imagine that
economic factors shape political and ideological conditions. Rather, what
one should think is that limits and tendencies “structure and determi-
ne only in the sense that they define the terrain on which historical forces
move”, that is, for the author “they define the horizons of possibility” ( Hall,
2003a: 308) – as in a sporting match where the size of the field and the rules
of the match were given, but not the position of the players. Thus, Marxism
is “without guarantees” because the consequences of capitalism on social
life are also not definitive and inescapable, since the dominance of a set of
ideas does not exclude the possibility of the insurgent, the alternative and
the counter-hegemonic.
Hall, therefore, expands the concept of ideology in relation to Marx,
because it contains not only a dimension of order preservation, but also the
processes of transformation and renewal. It is in the “ideological struggle”
(Hall, 2003c, 2003d) – expression appropriated from Antonio Gramsci, from
the notion of “war of position” – that gives the class struggle the dispute to
conserve or transform historical conditions. Hence Hall does not associate
himself with an idealistic project, with no basis in reality. On the contrary,
his approaching point with Marxism is even in his reading of cultural iden-
tity, as something constructed historically-socially and not found or given
by the immutable nature of things.
Here is a contradiction: if identity is constructed, how can it be con-
crete? It is not a matter of opposing the concrete to the abstract, but ra-
ther the constructed to natural, the historical to the immutable – displa-
2. Ironically, the same cement that leads us again to bring Hall closer to Marxism 2 . According
position is taken by
political economist
to Stuart Hall (2003b), in Marx’s notes on method, Marx’s method is abs-
Nicholas Garnham in his tract: he tries to unmask the theory of surplus value from the concre-
1979 text, published in
the Media, Culture and te relation of exploitation of the wage worker, and hence to explain the
Society Journal, in which fetishism of the commodity and the alienated relationships with work.
he criticizes Hall and the
post-Althusserians. For In other words, Marx develops a theoretical abstraction, unattainable
the author, “the abstract without intellectual effort, to shed light on what the Western European
should not be opposed to
the concrete, just as the worker in the second half of the nineteenth century felt on their skin, but
phenomenal forms should
not be opposed to the
he did not realize it, since he was submerged in the conditions perceived
real relations.” (Garnham, in a naturalized way by imposition of the capitalist system. It is, therefore,
1979: 125). The relations
of exchange – eminently
an effort to denaturalize, that is, to transform into history – abstract to
abstract – assume, reach the concrete (we can see that these concepts, concrete and abstract,
according to him, concrete
aspects in the materiality are not antagonistic).
of the money form. Unlike classical political economists, such as Smith and Ricardo, who
considered economic relations through an essentialist prism, that is, natural
and unavoidable, Marx presents a conception according to which the dif-
ferent forms of production are anchored in time and material conditions.
So also is Hall, by refusing individuality as something given before culture,
regaining the centrality of the historical real “without which we could not
have made ourselves” (Hall, 2007: 275). Cultural identity, therefore, is not
dissociated from concrete reality.
TO STUART HALL
When Hall talks about the condition of the black migrant in British
society, he refers to the conflicts of expression experienced by each of them
– and we must not forget that he is speaking to some extent of his own tra-
jectory. His perspective is concrete, that is, lived cultural practice, revealed
from the diaspora movement to the struggle for identity affirmation, inclu-
ding the assimilation and absorption of standardized cultural forms. On the
other hand, even if they narrate cases or expose facts, as Hall does with re-
currence, his approach goes beyond the empirical, that is, it surpasses both
the numeric and what the experience reveals.
In Cultural studies and the centre: some problematic and problems
(1980), Hall indicates an effort from cultural studies produced in the Cen-
ter of Birmigham to oppose the American functionalism. By abolishing the
contradiction of their analysis (the notion facing Marxism), the functiona-
lists use methods from natural and exact sciences, considered strong, to ex-
plain social phenomena – generating an empiricist and quantitative point
of view. Again, there is the fracture between the concrete and the empirical.
So if Stuart Hall’s thinking possesses some possibilities of approaching
Marxism from the understanding of the historical real, why do the fields of
cultural studies and the political economy of communication have difficulty
in dialogue?
PATHWAYS THAT BIFURCATE: TENSION AND BREAKING POINTS

BETWEEN CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY
OF COMMUNICATION
What would Stuart Hall contribute to the field of political economy of
communication? Collaborations are possible, but not always desirable, due
to the institutionalization of the spheres of academic knowledge. Beyond
the political obstacles, there are still some barriers to overcome.
The first one concerns the level of analysis, which differentiates the
path followed by cultural studies (and Hall, consequently), and the one
chosen by the political economy of communication: while the first group
is much more interested in the cultural practices lived and their forms
of specific expression, with appreciation for the microssocial unfolding,
the second search to understand the relations that are established at the
macrostructural level of capitalist society. There is a decisive, but not de-
finitive, fracture. After all, in social reality, the local and the global are
articulated as instances of power. Hall himself repeatedly escapes this rule
when he chooses to analyze conjuncture and recovers the concept of social
totality (Hall, 1980: 29) present in Marx and to which political economists
of communication often refer. According to Hall, based on Marx, social
totality is a dynamic product of differences and distinctions rather than
correspondences and similarities.
Followers of both lines have adopted this differentiation between the
big and the small, although it is not so clear in its origin. Culturalist resear-
ch tends to focus on the content, form, uses, and consumptions of commu-
nicative practices often, disregarding instances of economic production and
power structures – which generates a depoliticization of theory. Reflecting
a step taken by the Birmigham Center itself towards the structuralist con-
cept of text, this tendency to lose the historical and social link was warned
by Hall (1980) when he criticized the privilege that Levi-Strauss gave to the
synchronic in relation to Diachronic. On the other hand, the criticism to
which the political economists of communication are subject is the reverse
of the medal: the extended gaze overrides the specificities of the subjects
and the dynamics of interpersonal relations, and generates distorted gene-
ralizations. As Vincent Mosco (1996) teaches, the vision that accompanies
this field of study seeks to see the totality of the social dimensions and not
the fragments of reality.
Still according to Mosco, the social field is dynamic and composed of
numerous fractures in the process of change. For this, it is necessary to nu-
lify the notion of mechanical causality and inaugurate the idea of mutual
constitution, in which different factors are influenced. A similar concept
is central to Hall’s work – which shows that there is no incompatibility be-
tween the structural analyzes of the political economy of communication
and Hall’s thinking. It is the idea of articulation as a non-deterministic, but
dynamic, relationship between practices or phenomena:
By the term “articulation,” I mean a connection or link which is not necessa-

rily given in all cases, as a law or a fact of life, but which requires particular
conditions of existence to appear at all, which has constantly to be renewed,
which can under some circumstances disappear or to be overthrown, leading
to the old linkages being dissolved and new connections – re-articulations –
being forged. (Hall, 2003d: 196)
The second barrier between cultural studies and the political economy
of communication is based on distinctions about the conception of culture.
Hall proposes to expand the scope of this notion, since each institution or
activity generates its set of practices and meanings. In this way, we can talk
TO STUART HALL
about culture in unconventional spaces: as in the economic and the political.

Hall’s conception of culture is based on the notion of overdetermination:
what determines and at the same time is determined. In this way, culture
is understood as a constitutive part of the political and the economic, since
they are spheres that are “mutually constitutive of one another – which is
another way of saying that they are articulated with each other. “ (Hall 1997:
34 [emphasis added]).
Hall teaches that “every social practice has cultural or discursive con-
ditions of existence” (Hall, 1997: 34 [author’s italics]), a kind of face of
the social phenomena as discourse. The first risk of considering the pro-
minence of culture in the spheres of social life is the trivialization of the
term: if culture is everything, it can also be nothing. What defines the
characteristics of cultural expressions and practices? Is it possible to di-
sentangle them from the social whole or are they the whole, indefinitely?
The second reservation refers to a certain fatalism that the culturalist po-
sition can carry if taken to the extreme. If problems are explained only by
their cultural roots, they seem to escape the changing course of history, as
in the frequent conception of the common sense that says that “Brazilians
are lazy,” or depoliticized, that such a characteristic is part of “our culture”
So “there is no way”, there is no way to change. Such a limit, however, is
only felt if culture is thought in a static, fixed, way, and not as Hall unders-
tands it, that is, a dynamic process.
Finally, the third caution we need to take is in relation to the certain
discursive definition of culture that restricts the term to the notion of wri-
ting or literacy: after all, this is an understanding that is eminently Wes-
tern, Enlightenment-based and faithful to the structuralist project. What
about practices that are not translatable through writing, such as non-verbal
communication or relationships with the sacred, what of societies or practi-
ces not centered on literate culture, such as Afro-Brazilian religions? Accor-
ding to Lévi-Strauss cited by Hall (1980), despite the variety of significant
experiences, structures of sense-making are repeated through cultures. But
what guarantees such predictability in ways other than the presumption of
a Western reader? Hall himself, despite drinking at the structuralist source,
knows that he needs to go further by proposing the expansion of “the me-
aning of ‘culture’ from texts and representations to lived practices, belief
system an institutions [...]” (Hall, 1980: 23).
If in the apprehended conception of cultural studies the idea of prac-
tices and meanings experienced by the subjects prevails, for the political
economy of communication the notion of culture is eminently linked to
the idea of commodity. In a text published in the Media, Culture and So-
ciety Journal of 1979, Frenchman Bernard Miège analyzes the process by
which capitalism is promoted by culture. According to Miège, and this
position is recurrent in the authors of this movement, the cultural com-
modity has specificity, since it works with the imaginary and with the
conceptions of the world, but it is still a commodity. More than a set of
discursive practices that cross all spheres of life, culture is seen as an inte-
grated process to the capitalist economy. The conceptualization of cultural
merchandise seeks to see the relations between consumption and the capi-
talist conditions of production and reproduction
Since the 1990s, research related to cultural studies – mainly deri-
ved from the North American matrix – begins to distance itself from the
understanding of culture inserted in capitalist production. Although not
seeing opposition between the political economy of communication and
cultural studies, Vincent Mosco (1996) criticizes this tendency from three
points: firstly, by overestimating the audience freedom, as if consuming
meant choosing (as a citizen); by minimizing commodification, one of the
central axes of contemporary culture; and, finally, for confusing active re-
ception with political activity, as if the most critical public in relation to TV
programs, evidence shown by reception surveys, implied in alternatives of
political participation.
Would there be here an unbridgeable gap between the political eco-
nomy of communication and cultural studies? Would the notion of cul-
ture have condemned the two currents to antagonistic paths? From the
historical point of view, both theoretical matrices have a common origin
as a reaction to the political model of authoritarian socialism. However, at
some point in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies expanded and assumed
different shades, following the tendency to view culture as an autonomous
field of reality. This is what Armand Mattelart and Erik Neveu associate
with the depoliticization of this matrix, different from the original posi-
tion of Hall and others, which generates problems that “feed mainly the
3. Hall has always denied populist tendencies, endowing the consumers of cultural products with a
the position of founding
father of cultural studies, sovereign reflexivity that makes critical work Superfluous” (2004: 154).
not as one who denies Herscovici, Bolaño and Mastrini (2000: 6) criticize the fact that “the latest
the child, but for not
believing that position developments in cultural studies have been accompanied by the neglect of
existed: “I deny paternity – themes such as classes and power,” referring to the developments taken in
cultural studies had many
origins, many ‘fathers’, but the 1990s. At the same time, and not by chance, this stream of studies was
nevertheless, one feels a
certain responsibility for
institutionalized as a canon in the academy, despite the transdisciplinary
it. (Hall, 2007: 271-272). effort in essence of the founding fathers3.
TO STUART HALL
In fact, Hall never understood cultural studies as a discipline, because

the clearly established boundaries between the sciences did not account for
a changing world. His effort for transdisciplinarity results from the per-
ception of “a disjuncture between the disciplines, on the one hand, and the
rapidly shifting and changing fragments of reality which confront us today”
(Hall, 2007: 276). At one point, Hall (1980) goes so far as to mock the science
that has only an answer to the world if it is no longer mutable.
However, research affiliated with cultural studies gained a foothold in
the hegemonic academic scenarios of communication, although there was
no disciplinary institutionalization in Brazil (due to the fact that it was
not necessary), in the form of studies on: reception, media usage and con-
sumption; media culture; language, texts and images; entertainment; media
practices; body; representations and identities, among others. On the other
hand, the political economy of communication, especially in Brazil and in
other Latin American countries, remained on the margins of hegemonic
thought and still undertakes an effort to constitute the field, which often
contributes to its isolation.
EXIT DOORS: BEYOND BORDERS

In Brazil, the boundaries between political economy of communication
and cultural studies take on other forms, but impasses have been perpetuated
and accentuated by the fracture between two antagonistic fields: on the one
hand, a current focused on specific cultural dynamics, searching the reflexes
of content and media consumption on the reality lived by people, generally
without regard to the production and reproduction structures of cultural in-
dustries; on the other hand, a matrix concerned with conflicts of interest and
the mechanisms of domination, and which examines the hegemonic groups’
actions in an eminently critical bias (often close to denunciation). Among the
fractures observed between the two fields are: the difficulty of articulating
micro and macrosocial instances; The separation of subject and structure; and
the contrast between the processes of cultural production and reproduction,
on the one hand, and content consumption, on the other.
However, as seen in Hall’s theoretical proposal, it is necessary to overco-
me the interpretive binarisms from a broader effort to understand the articu-
lations between the different spheres of social life. This path does not mean
abandoning the specificities of each angle or tool of analysis, but allowing the
various matrices to dialogue from their contradictions and counterpositions
– putting the differences under erasure. As occur in family conflicts, the first
defense is to point the other as guilty. Especially in Latin America and Brazil,
where academic disputes become a breakdown of crumbs, the two camps do
not communicate. Would they both be condemned to insurmountable bor-
ders? This is not the lesson learned from Hall, for whom the limits set by
disciplines reduce the ability to understand the world.
Cultural problems cross the economic, political and ideological sphe-
res – culture cannot be thought of as an isolated practice. Cultural studies,
regardless of the stream to which they belong, need to discuss the issues of
access and equal distribution of cultural goods and services, the ethical and
social need of culture policies, and the power struggles that occur in the
cultural and communicative spheres – themes of reference for the political
economy of communication. This matrix needs to understand the variety
of cultural agendas placed by social groups, even by the plurality of indivi-
duals, especially with respect to representation and the question of identity,
and from there to seek the place of alternative practices that distend and
destabilize the hegemonic framework – demands for which the source of
cultural studies is rich in responses.
The two camps have common agendas, related to the centrality of culture
and communication in contemporary life. One of the challenges for both is to
understand the role of the subjects in social structure; For this key point, the
path of analysis lies in the notion of articulation as understood by Hall, which
allows us to understand how actors influence political, economic and cultural
processes and are influenced by them in a dynamic of mutual constitution. In
this case, PEC and CS views can work together by articulating what is macro
and micro. Another challenging agenda for both camps is the political role of
cultural relations in society transformation, especially regarding the exercise of
citizenship, mainly in societies where there is still a lack of effective rights and
democracy, as it is the case in Brazil. It is necessary to understand to what extent
relations mediated by culture and communication reproduce unequal structu-
res of power or enable the emergence of new expressions and reflections. This
is a fertile ground for working the articulation between the views of political
economy and cultural studies from the contributions of Stuart Hall’s critical
and transformative proposal, with dialogue as a way to overcome prejudices. M
REFERENCES
GARNHAM, N. Contribution to a political economy of mass communica-
tion. Media, Culture and Society, Thousand Oaks, v. I, n. 2, p. 123-146,
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TO STUART HALL
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Article received on March 15, 2015 and approved on May 23, 2016.

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173

About bridges and abysms: approaches

In memory of Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

THE RELATIONSHIP OF HALL WITH MARX AND MARXISM:

parameters in reality, whose panel would be composed of fluid and mutant

PATHWAYS THAT BIFURCATE: TENSION AND BREAKING POINTS

By the term “articulation,” I mean a connection or link which is not necessa-

about culture in unconventional spaces: as in the economic and the political.

In fact, Hall never understood cultural studies as a discipline, because

EXIT DOORS: BEYOND BORDERS

GRAMSCI, A. Cadernos do cárcere: Maquiavel. Notas sobre o Estado e a

Konder. Seleção de José Arthur Giannotti. São Paulo: Abril Cultural,

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